Natural Causes of Language by Enfield - New awesome free book with video introduction

N.J. Enfield of the Univeristy of Sydney and Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics has just written a book at the open access publisher Language Science Press. It's called "Natural causes of language: Frames, biases, and cultural transmission".Whoop whoop, you can download it and read it right now and the author has made a video introduction. If you're stressed and think you can't deal with this right now, know that the book is 64 pages and the video is 2.21 minutes. It's well within you capabilities and it is very much worth it if you have any interested in language whatsoever.The best part of the video is when he talks about the kinds of doubts that we have in linguistics, for example "that language is a real thing" and "that tree diagrams are useful representations of language history". Couldn't agree more.This book is a part of a new series they're launching called "conceptual foundations of language science". I'm already excited about the next one.AbstractWhat causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts. A biased transmission model provides a basis for understanding why certain things and not others are likely to develop, spread, and stick in languages. Because bits of language are always parts of systems, we also need to show how it is that items of knowledge and behavior become structured wholes. The book argues that to achieve this, we need to see how causal processes apply in multiple frames or 'time scales' simultaneously, and we need to understand and address each and all of these frames in our work on language. This forces us to confront implications that are not always comfortable: for example, that "a language" is not a real thing but a convenient fiction, that language-internal and language-external processes have a lot in common, and that tree diagrams are poor conceptual tools for understanding the history of languages. By exploring avenues for clear solutions to these problems, this book suggests a conceptual framework for ultimately explaining, in causal terms, what languages are like and why they are like that.

This time: how to take your search results and make the matching annotations into new separate tier(s). This is useful if you for example want to cycle through only the annotations that match a certain search query in transcription mode. This post has a longer guide, and a short guide at the end.

You can also use this guide if you want to compare several different transcriptions with each other, for example older and newer versions or if you are collaborating with different people. In that case, start from step (4).

For those who don't do a lot of transcription: ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is a program from TLA at MPI-Nijmegen. This program allows us to easily annotate audio and/or video files with lots of relevant data. We can use ELAN to c…

Humans Who Read Grammars

This is a blog by young linguists interested in diversity and description of the world's languages. We write posts about research and academia relevant to young linguists and sometimes also the general public.